The White Cross (62 page)

All but one.

In the final hours of siege, a young arbalester on the battlements contrived to wound the King whilst he was making one of his theatrical appearances before the literally captive audience in the castle. The biographers who still insist on seeing Richard as some sort of medieval cricket captain would have us believe that he applauded (
‘Oh, good shot!’
) before summoning the surgeons to attend his wound. The quarrel had missed his vital organs. But the King by then was more or less rectangular. So by the time they’d cut down though his body-fat to extract the missile, the outcome was inevitable.

We’re told the arbalester shot again at Richard after he was dragged into his presence. This time with words.

‘You have already killed my father and two brothers,’ he’s reported to have said. ‘So take your revenge on me in any way you like. Now that I’ve seen you on your deathbed I am ready to endure it.’

Legend credits the royal hero with a chivalrous decision, not only to forgive the boy for shooting and defying him, but to reward him for it with a fortune; a hundred silver shillings. But all we know for sure is that the arbalester was saved – not actually from hanging, but only from the privilege of hanging in his skin. Because they tied the poor boy to a cart’s tail and subjected him to the agonising death of having the skin flayed from his still-living body, before hoisting what was left of it to hang beside his father and his brothers on the gallows.

Do I believe from what I know of him, that wasn’t on the orders of the dying king, who’d learned the art of flaying prisoners in Palestine? Do you? In any case, the crossbow quarrel carried shreds of dirty fabric deep into the wound – to start the gangrenous infection which was to take eleven days to kill the King.

He died in early April, before the Easter festival – coincidentally on the very Tuesday Garon and Elise of Haddertun’s fourth child was brought into the world.

After his death, King Richard’s bearded chin and all his servants’ heads were shaved in preparation for his funeral. His horses’ ears were sliced, their tails were docked. His mother came, flint-faced with grief, to see him on his deathbed. Queen Bérangère preferred to stay away. By usual custom, a wax impression was taken of the royal features. The remainder of the Body Royal was first eviscerated and then divided – and you may be sure that there was plenty of it to go round!

King Richard’s blood was sent to Aquitaine, his brain and liver to Poitou, his heart to Normandy, his bowels to stay within the Limousin where he was killed. The rest of him was soaked in frankincense, wrapped in a white-crossed cloak, stitched into a bull’s hide, placed in a coffin sealed with lead and buried at his father’s feet in Fontevraud. For England, which had paid so handsomely for his release and bound itself to Germany for his return, there wasn’t so much as a pared toenail.

So King dead, end of story? If only!

Dissection
first, then
distribution
; and finally in course of time for Richard –
resurrection!
(Not as he’d been in life, you understand, but as something considerably finer.)

In London’s Hyde Park, at the western entrance of Prince Albert’s Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, a huge three-times-life-sized plaster statue of the Lionheart on a prancing Fauvel was erected – to prove that you should never underestimate the power of glamour. It showed the King in his (imaginary) prime, muscled like a wrestler in lycra-tight linkmail with sword upraised in triumph. All who passed beneath it understood the sculpture to stand for everything that was aggressively colonial, patriotic and indestructibly heroic in Victoria’s great empire; King Richard in the image of Saint George.

Nine years later, cast by then in bronze and largely paid for by public subscription, King Richard’s statue was re-erected in Old Palace Yard outside the Houses of Parliament, to become the most unlikely champion of democratic principle that you could possibly imagine. And there he still sits, flourishing his sword; a crusading warrior whose bloodthirsty idea of justice is even now associated with our kingdom in the Middle East. On one side of his statue’s plinth, a bas relief shows Richard on his deathbed forgiving his assailant. On the other he is mounted and in battle, at Joppa or Arsuf. (The bodies of eviscerated women and beheaded children have been tactfully omitted.)

And why, one has to ask, is Richard still there in his monumental pride of place outside Westminster Hall? Apathy? Because it’s easier to ignore a thing than change it? Or ignorance?

‘We still think of him, you know, as one of our great heroes.’

Either would be bad enough as motives. Worse would be to think that we are honouring a bully, sanctioning negotiation with a naked sword. I’d hate to think he’s there to justify our willingness to go to war in countries where the word
‘crusade’
has once again become a byword for violent Western intervention. I like to think, like Garon, that we’re capable of learning from our past mistakes.

But back to the Victorians and Richard’s legend.

Fuelled by Sir Walter Scott’s romances (and that heroic statue), by 1867 the Lionheart’s mythic power was such, that the Empress Queen herself petitioned the French government to send to England from Anjou King Richard’s chalkstone funerary effigy, which she’d been told the French were not maintaining as they should. The French response was to decline, while surreptitiously touching up the paint on the old image. So to this day, the likeness, which Queen Eléonore commissioned, can still be seen in the Abbey Church of Fontevraud. It shows her son as she intended, as staggeringly handsome – tall and slim with the heroic visage of a god and all deformities of physique and character removed.

Her own effigy lies close beside him with an open prayer book, and a smug expression on its face.

A third likeness of King Richard, evidently modelled from a death mask, may be seen in Rouen Cathedral on the tomb which covers Normandy’s share of his body; Richard’s heart. It wears what seems to be an oriental crown, and shows a short-necked and balefully unpleasant-looking man with beetling brows and a pugnacious downturned mouth. The heart itself – the legendary
‘coeur de lion’,
described as twice the size of any normal man’s – still lies beneath; and when in 1838 an inquisitive historian was licensed to exhume it, he found the famous organ wrapped in linen in a crystal box within a leaden casket and holding still to a material form.

But then the truth wrapped in clean linen, as my Elise maintained, is still the truth; and time by then had shrivelled Richard’s heart to something black and leathery, and really
RATHER SMALL
.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to Clare Christian of Red Door Publishing and Elaine Sharples of typesetter.org.uk for invaluable help with this novel. I am indebted to Dr David Abulafia, to Dr Paul Brand, and to Christopher Whittick of the East Sussex Records Office for the many useful clues they supplied to help me find my fictional path through the medieval labyrinth; also to Mr Whittick for his original translations of Archbishop Baldwin’s Latin tracts and sermons, to Enid Nixon for access to contemporary details of King Richard’s coronation, to David Skinner and Mr A. North of the Victoria and Albert Museum for help with my researches on
Greek Fire
, to Mebrak Ghebrewelhdi and Simon McLaren of Vandu Language Services in Lewes for access to translators, to Abdel Rahim, John Kinory and Marcella Marzona, respectively, for editing my Arabic, Hebrew and Piemontèis quotes and depictions, to Mohammad Talib Ali for his insights into Islamic culture, to Stephen Bamber for helping me to live with my curiously temperamental computer – and as ever to my wife, Lee, for her unfailing support, her perceptive comments, her skill at spotting literal errors and for her general forbearance. I asked her repeatedly if she had the patience to see me through the horrendously selfish process of writing another novel, and amazingly she had.

For additional, helpful assistance my thanks are due to Dale Anderson, Jane Atkinson, Kate Burt, Julia Forrest, David Garst, Annie Garwood, Professor Brian Hill, Julie Hodder, Sir David and Lady Hunt, Maggie Justice, Jane and Richard D. Lewis, Robert, Georgina & Luke Masefield, Will and Stephanie Masefield, Ivan and Lara Rudd, Vivienne Schuster, The British Museum, The Science Museum, The Barbican House Museum at Lewes, the Jordanian National Museum of Archaeology and to the staff of the London, Westminster Abbey and Lewes Libraries.

Published by

RedDoor

www.reddoorpublishing.co.uk

© 2014 Richard Masefield

The right of Richard Masefield to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ISBN 978-0-9928520-7-8

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author

Literary quotations in the novel are taken from a nineteenth century translation from the Latin of The Itinerary of Richard I and Others to the Holy Land, and Clennell Wilkinson’s 1933 biography of King Richard, Coeur de Lion

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover design: Brown Media